Consulting the oracle…

Shhhhh… children. I want to tell you about a time when there was no internet. A time when if you wanted to know something you had to walk to the library or ask someone who might know the answer – a teacher or an uncle or someone. Of course sometimes they were wrong or simply didn’t know, but they did their best and they were probably almost as good as Wikipedia on a good day.

These days all of the knowledge in the world is to be found on the internet. If you need to know something you simply key your question and within moments the answer comes back. There’s no need to wonder, no need to consult another wiser person, no need to look in books. We can all know everything all of the time and perhaps that’s why these days we expect to know the answers to all of our questions.

Before the internet we didn’t have all the answers. Sometimes we had to work it out for ourselves, sometimes we had to guess, and sometimes we were simply left wondering. These days everyone has the oracle in their pocket. There’s no need to stare at birds entrails, shout down a well, or undertake an arduous voyage to a temple in Greece. The internet has all the answers to all of our questions.

With the answers to everything literally at our fingertips the wonder has gone. We expect (need) to know all of the answers all of the time and when we can’t find one it confuses us. Silly really, expecting to know everything, without having to work it out for ourselves through experiencing and question.

Ask the internet why you feel sad and it presents you with a depression test, from sad to depression at the click of a button. If you feel ill, give the internet a list of your symptoms and it’ll return any number of illnesses you are suffering from. It’ll tell you how to destroy the world, tell you how and when the world will end, wish you a happy birthday when you are trying to forget yet another one, it can even tell you what the big question is.

The internet seems to be all knowing and is becoming omnipresent. With more and more people turning to it for solutions, I wonder how long it will be before the internet has its own religion?